Thursday, April 24, 2014

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Thom Hartmann discusses how Reaganomics were designed to crush the U.S.' middle class - and have succeeded in that goal:

Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to
working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage
their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another
billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes?

This
is the main reason why, when GM was our largest employer and our
working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30
times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time
America’s middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until,
of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved
from the middle class to becoming the working poor.

...

If you compare a chart showing the historical top income tax rate
over the course of the twentieth century with a chart of income
inequality in the United States over roughly the same time period,
you’ll see that the period with the highest taxes on the rich – the
period between the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations – was also the
period with the lowest levels of economic inequality.

You’ll also notice that since marginal tax rates started to plummet during the Reagan years, income inequality has skyrocketed.

Even
more striking, during those same 33 years since Reagan took office and
started cutting taxes on the rich, income levels for the top 1 percent
have ballooned while income levels for everyone else have stayed pretty much flat.
...
Creating
a middle class is always a choice, and by embracing Reaganomics and
cutting taxes on the rich, we decided back in 1980 not to have a middle
class within a generation or two...

This, of course, is exactly what
conservatives always push for. When wealth is spread more equally among
all parts of society, people start to expect more from society and start
demanding more rights.

- Molly Ball writes that some U.S. governments are starting to learn their lesson about the dangers of privatization - but only after having forfeited vital public institutions to the private sector.

- David Green discusses how the temporary foreign worker program is designed to make sure that employers can avoid the market forces which would otherwise lead prosperity to be shared with workers. And PressProgress highlights the fact that Jason Kenney was warned that he lacked accurate jobs data - but kept on spouting talking points with gross disregard for their accuracy rather than looking into how his government has attacked the evidence-gathering process.

- Finally, Linda McQuaig writes about Stephen Harper's fetishization of war even as the public moves past any desire to funnel resources into destruction.